All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Navigation

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to
use the classic discussion system instead. If you login, you can remember this preference.

(Caveat - I have not read Dave's book, so I don't know exactly what is in it.) "core" C (c.f. "core" perl) would be hard, as I think that to do it properly you'd have to re-implement Perl's data structures in C. However, I don't know if any freely available C libraries give you enough to avoid that step, and hence make writing data munging with foolib viable.

However, rather than pure "Data munging with Python" what I'd really like to see is "Data munging with Perl/Python/Ruby/TCL" (say) where there are equivalent code examples in all 4 (or 3? too many?) languages, so that you can directly see how they map to each other. For that matter, "Data munging in Perl6" could also be quite informative.

However, rather than pure "Data munging with Python" what I'd really like to see is "Data munging with Perl/Python/Ruby/TCL" (say) where there are equivalent code examples in all 4 (or 3? too many?) languages, so that you can directly see how they map to each other. For that matter, "Data munging in Perl6" could also be quite informative.

Amen!

I've been waiting for a while to see a book
that intelligently presents (and possibly
compares) the same technique in several
languages, and since text munging is su

There are equivalent command structures in both languages, but would just translating code segments cut it, really ? Some of the most useful things I learnt from the book are specific to Perl.. (fiddling with the record separator variable, for example)

Then again, (this is because I dont know any better:) ), does Python have an equivalent to Parse::RecDescent ? (there is one chapter worth of material on that module alone)

Not as such. There are several parser
building libraries available, but none of them
have the breadth and scope of Parse::RecDescent.

This is, I think, because the Python community
doesn't have a specifically-retained Mad Scientist.
The language can definitely natively support a Parse::RecDescent-type module (as opposed to C, like Nicholas points out), though.

You could do a lot worse than pick up some
Python -- it's a nice language, with a lot going
for it. And, for as much as we in Perl community
like to complain about it, it's a lot more similar
to Perl than many other languages that we don't
complain about (it's just an easier target that
many other languages).